


Mentos

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: Drunk Dialing, Fluff with a Happy Ending, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Phone Calls, Pining for the tundra, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:14:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21596704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: Ray found the sweater right at the back of his closet.
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Comments: 22
Kudos: 110
Collections: due South Seekrit Santa 2019





	Mentos

**Author's Note:**

  * For [look_turtles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/look_turtles/gifts).



> Thanks to cj2017, alltoseek and alcyone301 for beta!

“Pen, pen, pen, pen, pen…” Ray propped his phone between ear and shoulder as he rummaged through the chaos on his sofa. “Hold on, I know I got one somewhere.”

“Sometime today would be good,” Vecchio said, his voice crackling over the cordless line.

“Who died and made you the Lieu? We’re not even on call today.” Ray made a grab for a heap of paperwork, missed, and watched it cascade across the empty pizza boxes on the floor.

“I know the rotas, smart guy. I also know that if we don’t collar that witness before her friendly neighborhood goons do, she’s gonna come down with a serious case of amnesia. So find a goddamn pen and write down the address already.”

Ray caught a ballpoint as it rolled out of his stack of flyers. “Ha, gotcha! Uh, wait, it’s one of Fraser’s. Hold on a sec.”

“Kowalski, can you please just—”

“Just gimme a minute! Jesus!”

Vecchio sighed theatrically, but there was an edge of sympathy to it. He’d been partnered with Fraser too. He maybe didn’t _get_ it exactly, but he knew how far to push.

Ray kept searching, swearing softly to himself. He’d found several of Fraser’s pens lying around his apartment in the last few months. Lying around the station, too. They were kind of hard to miss: gaudy red ballpoints emblazoned with the logo of a Canadian hydroelectric company whose name alone had been enough to make Fraser twitch. Ray hadn’t gotten why Fraser used them at all, until he’d discovered a promotional box of them stashed under the front desk at the Consulate. Then he’d understood: the more of them Fraser managed to wear out on “official business”, the fewer he was forced to hand out to actual Canadians.

Ray had stolen a whole bunch of them after that. He’d filled out all his case notes and incident reports with them. All his shopping lists, too. He’d even snapped one in half and used its inner tube to clean out the plughole in his shower. He figured Fraser would have approved. One way or another, they’d all gotten used up, broken, lost. Only this one left now. No chance of resupply, not with Fraser half a continent away.

Ray propped the pen on his shelf unit next to his old bowling trophy and tried to remember where he’d put his pencil from yesterday.

“Coat pocket,” he muttered, grabbing his jacket off the lamp and patting it down. Yup, the pencil stub was still there. He fished it out and readied his notebook. “Okay, I’m golden.”

Vecchio read the address out. “Meet me there in twenty, okay? Try to look presentable this time. And, Kowalski?”

“What?”

“It’s not like Fraser’s incommunicado, you know. You could try calling him once in a while.”

Ray took a careful breath and let it out again. “Meet you in twenty,” he said, and hung up.

* * *

Ray might have reached the end of the ballpoint bonanza, but lost coins were still turning up like, uh, bad pennies. Canadian coins, that is, not real money. Behind his sofa cushions, under the rug, in his desk drawers at work, inside the tumble dryer down in the basement. (And yeah, he should probably have emptied the filter out months ago, but nobody else had either. His apartment block neighbors were worse slobs than he was.)

It was weird how much cash Fraser must have mislaid over the years. Because, sure, he was careless with money, but not in that sense. He was the kind of guy who’d give twenty bucks to the first smooth-talking bum with a sob story but then save up all his quarters for Ray’s snack machine needs. “Take care of the pennies, Ray, and the pounds will take care of themselves,” he’d told him once, which made no damn sense, but anyway.

It wasn’t just nickel and dime stuff, either. Some of the coins were worth way more than normal small change. Take the toonie Ray had found wedged under his CD player yesterday, for instance. That was worth—he scowled at the math—well, nothing, obviously, because the snack machine didn’t take Canadian. But if it had, it would have snagged him two or three Snickers bars, minimum.

For a while after the Franklin trip, Ray hadn’t thought he would ever want to eat chocolate again. Chocolate, or any fatty food. He could still hear Fraser’s patient Explaining-to-Ray voice insisting that it was the only way to replace the amount of calories they were burning, what with the dog sledding and the cross-country skiing and the insane, bone-aching cold that kept trying to kill them both. (Fraser claimed it wasn’t _trying,_ per se. It was just _there,_ nothing personal. It felt kind of personal to Ray, though.) In an environment like that, greed became a virtue. But money, money was worthless. It was dead weight, there was nowhere to spend it, and in any case it couldn’t buy the only things that mattered: being safe and warm and _not lost._

Ray tossed the toonie from hand to hand a few times. Then he got up and added it to the wobbly stack on his shelving unit, next to Fraser’s pen. Half a dozen more and he’d have enough to build an inuksuk.

* * *

Ray was cleaning out Turtle’s vivarium when he found Fraser’s Chicago Public Library card lying on the carpet beside its stand. Maybe it had been stuck underneath the tank somehow, or mixed up with the cleaning supplies. Either way, it must have been there a while.

He picked it up by its corners, flexing it between finger and thumb. It didn’t seem damaged, its laminated plastic still uncreased. For a moment he thought it might be funny to go check out a bunch of books under Fraser’s name. If he wet his hair to darken it, shaved real close, dug out that old red t-shirt from the back of his closet, he might just about pass for Fraser, if no one looked too hard. A real hungover Fraser, maybe, who hadn’t slept for a week. What was the penalty for impersonating a Mountie, anyway? They couldn’t get you for something that wasn’t on the statute books, right? He squinted at the card. That was the kind of question that hadn’t even been on his radar pre-Fraser. Nah, Mountie impersonation might be illegal north of the border, but he should be pretty safe in Illinois.

Fraser could probably tell him. Fraser could probably recite the whole Illinois criminal code, chapter and verse. If Ray got himself arrested, would Fraser come bail him out? “Hey, Frase, you said to call if I needed anything, so, uh…”

Yeah, no, he wasn’t going to risk it.

Besides, it turned out you didn’t need a lot of ID to join a library these days. When he stopped by his local branch next day to return the card, the librarian offered him one of his own right away, using nothing but his driver’s license. It was like they _wanted_ you to run off with their books. It didn’t seem like great security to him, but hey, not his problem.

The librarian didn’t take Fraser’s card off him, either. Ray held it right out, not even gripping it all that hard, but she just smiled and said, “How about you keep that, just in case?”

He hadn’t really been planning to use the place, but she offered him the nickel tour in such a hopeful, Fraserish kind of way that he found himself agreeing just to be polite. For a small building, it was surprisingly well stocked. He followed her past shelf after shelf of fiction: general, historical, sci-fi, family sagas (no way, he got enough of that from the Vecchios), and crime (double no—he’d loved crime novels as a teenager, but once he’d slogged his way through the Academy, all the procedural errors drove him nuts). Then past a bank of computers, and he was into non-fiction.

He definitely hadn’t intended to borrow anything. He didn’t have much chance to read anything but case notes these days, and with him and Vecchio neck-deep in the Verdelli case, he wasn’t suddenly going to have time on his hands. But then a picture of a turtle on one of the spines caught his eye, so he pulled out the slim volume entitled _Reptile Care for Beginners_ and flicked straight to the chapter on turtles. Skimming through the section marked Environmental Enrichment made him feel kind of guilty; maybe Turtle was bored in his tank? Ray glanced at his watch. No time to read now, but he might as well take the book with him. Might as well take that one on huskies, too, so he’d have some idea what to get Diefenbaker for Christmas. At the last minute he grabbed _Northwest Passages: a History of Arctic Exploration,_ because it reminded him of a song Fraser had liked, and because the pictures looked cool. He’d find time somehow.

* * *

Ray found the sweater right at the back of his closet, while he was searching for his spare sneakers. It wasn’t much to look at, just a grubby old cable-knit pullover with its neck unraveling, but when he took an experimental sniff, the scent-memory hit him like a snowball to the gut.

He had no clue what it was even doing there, unless his mom had tidied it away that one time she’d insisted a spring clean would cheer him up. Fraser used to leave spare clothes around the place, sure—the amount of messes he’d dragged Ray into, a change of clothing became a basic survival tool—but he wouldn’t have been seen dead in this thing. Not in Chicago, anyway. In Chicago, he was only ever squeaky clean and perfectly pressed. And this, this was a north-of-the-border kind of sweater, a tousle-haired, woodchips-in-the-snow kind of sweater. Ray would have bet dollars to donuts it was the exact same one Fraser had worn that last day after the dogsled trip, except it couldn’t be, because Fraser and his sweaters hadn’t ever come back to the US, had they? He and all his stupid lumberjack clothes were still up there, busy…lumberjacking, or whatever the hell a guy did when he lived alone in the snowy wastes of nowhere with no one but a half-wolf for company.

Ray narrowed his eyes at the offending garment. The damn thing was probably pining for the tundra, or the taiga or whatever. He ought to parcel it up and send it north already, or toss it in the trash, one or the other.

Instead, before he could second-guess himself, he picked up the phone and dialed the number that had been lying untouched beside the handset for the past few months.

“Hey,” he said, when the line connected. “It’s me.”

“Ray!” There was a scuffling sound, and a woman’s voice in the background murmured something indecipherable. “Hold on a minute, Ray.”

Ray held on, although it took way longer than a minute. He sat with his fingers clenched around the phone, feeling like an idiot and wishing he’d followed his first instincts and gone to the Post Office. He could hear muffled voices, then a distant barking that was presumably Diefenbaker, and finally the slam of a door, before footsteps approached again.

“There’s no need to play the injured party, Dief,” Fraser’s voice said, just audible. “It’s not as if you haven’t been known to consume evidence before.” There was a clunk as he picked up the phone. “Ray? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“Oh.” Fraser exhaled hard, a rush of white noise across the line. “Sorry, I was afraid you’d—I mean, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long. We had to secure the bodies in the meat shed before Diefenbaker or any other vermin tried to assist with the investigation.”

“Oh,” Ray said. Then his nose wrinkled. “Wait, a meat shed, seriously? You don’t have a morgue?”

“Of course we do, in town, when it’s required. Perhaps I should have said carcasses rather than bodies. Animal carcasses, the untagged remains of Dall sheep and muskoxen this time, most likely from off-quota hunting, possibly within the boundaries of the national park itself, although we haven’t been able to prove that yet. Not that I…” Fraser hesitated. “Well, the whole case probably sounds absurd to someone dealing with actual homicides on a day-to-day basis.”

“Nah, I get it,” Ray said. “Muskoxen, they’re protected, right?”

“Yes, and there are hunting quotas on the sheep.”

“Right. I mean, you got quotas for a reason. You take out keystone species, it upsets the whole food chain. Populations fall too low, then they’re hyper-vulnerable to natural fluctuations, and all it takes is one bad winter to cut them down to a genetic bottleneck, maybe even wipe them out. Biodiversity’s vital.”

“Yes,” Fraser said, sounding surprised. “Exactly.”

Ray thumbed the edge of his library copy of _North American Fauna_. “I can _read,_ you know, Frase. I mean, not like tracks and stuff—I wouldn’t know a muskox footprint if it smacked me round the ear—but I can read.”

“You know, that did always strike me as a possibility,” Fraser said, and Ray could hear the smile in his voice. “It’s just that in my experience you tend to concentrate your research on topics more relevant to the urban environment.”

“Yeah, but you never know what’s gonna come in handy. I mean, me and Vecchio don’t got any muskoxen of interest lined up right this minute, but trust me, if we could link any of them to the Verdelli brothers case, they’d jump straight to the top of my shit-list.”

“Ah. One of your organized crime cases, I take it.”

“Yup,” Ray said. “Big one. All the usual stuff: racketeering, intimidation, plus now we got a dead shopkeeper with her partner fitted up as suspect numero uno. We got opportunity, motive, his prints all over the gun. I know he’s clean, Vecchio knows he’s clean, but the neighbors won’t talk and the DA’s looking for someone to fry.”

“Hmm,” Fraser said. “A tricky situation. Could you prove the storeowners were victims of a protection racket? A pattern of regular payments made or missing?”

“Working on it. Plus the place had all new locks and windows, so we dug up the glazier’s receipt, called him, and hey, surprise, he says it wasn’t the partner who smashed the place up in the first place. Vecchio’s gonna go get his statement tomorrow.”

“Excellent. It sounds like you have things under control, then.”

“Kinda, I guess, for that one guy. I mean, it’s not like we can snap our fingers and make the world Mob-free.”

Fraser was silent for a few moments. “But if you can save one innocent man from a murder charge…” he began at last.

“Yeah, I know. Better than nothing.”

“Keep me posted?”

“Will do,” Ray said, realizing as he said it that he meant it. “Hey, thanks for, y’know, listening.”

“Not at all. Sometimes it helps to talk things through.”

“Yeah. Okay then. Speak to you soon.”

“I’ll look forward to it. Good night, Ray.”

Ray hung up, thoughtful. It was only later that he remembered he’d never even mentioned the sweater.

* * *

October went by, then November. Cases came and went; sometimes Ray talked them over with Fraser, sometimes he didn’t. He called most evenings anyway. As Fraser said, it was good to talk.

Ray turned thirty-nine on a gray, rainy day in early December. He’d never really bothered celebrating his birthday. Not since he was a kid, anyway. Who wanted yet another shindig shoehorned between Thanksgiving and Christmas? But the Vecchios seemed to think it was their business to organize a party for him, or maybe they just liked excuses to drag the whole family together again and eat too much food. He got surprisingly unsucky presents from them, too, including a Hawks jersey from Ray Vecchio and a history of the Iditarod from Frannie. It wasn’t quite up there with the fake birthday he’d spent in a crypt with Fraser, maybe, but it wasn’t a washout either.

His final gift took him a while to find. It wasn’t until he’d emptied the last of his Smarties into his coffee the next morning and gone looking in the cupboard for a new box that he noticed the small white parcel hidden behind his chocolate stash. Inside was a compass: a sturdy, practical, modern one, with a clear rectangular frame and a plastic dial, hung from a nylon lanyard. The sheet of notepaper around it read “Happy birthday, Ray,” in Fraser’s handwriting.

Ray turned it over and twisted its dial to the north, nodding appreciatively. A few years back he might not have thought much of it, but now he knew better. Because you could navigate by the sun and stars, sure, or by the landmarks, or the moss on the north side of trees, but sooner or later the sky would be overcast or heavy with snow, and there wouldn’t be any landmarks, maybe not even any trees; nothing but endless whiteness. Then a compass could be life or death—assuming you knew how to use it, and Ray, after ten weeks as Fraser’s dogsled buddy, was shit-hot on that.

“How’d it even get here, anyway?” he asked Fraser, when he called him that evening. “You teleport it in or something? You got spies working at the Consulate? Wait, tell me you didn’t send Vecchio to break into my place.”

“I didn’t send Ray Vecchio to break into your place,” Fraser said, and Ray could tell he was doing that secret-smiling thing again.

Ray ran a fingertip across the dust at the back of the cupboard. “You hid it here,” he said, suddenly sure of it. “You hid it where I wouldn’t notice till I’d used up all the Smarties, and it’s been here the whole time.”

“I, uh…I did, yes. I’m sorry it’s late. I must have slightly miscalculated your chocolate intake.”

“Nah, ’cause I had that summer flu back in August, so there were a couple days there I didn’t even make coffee.”

“Ah. That would account for it.” Fraser cleared his throat. “I’m aware it may not be the most appropriate gift for an urban dweller, but I thought that, should you ever need to find your way home…”

“I’ll know how.” Ray traced the scale markings on the edge of the compass. “Thanks, Frase.”

“You’re welcome.”

Ray toyed with the dial for a while longer, watching its needle swing northwards. Then he said, “I, uh, got a whole shelf of your stuff here, you know. Just sitting around.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. I mean, just the stuff you left behind or forgot or whatever. A sweater, some pens, that kinda thing.”

“Ah,” Fraser said. “Well, I’m sorry to have been a litterbug, Ray.”

“Nah, it’s good to have, y’know, thingummies. Reminders. What’s the word? Like the mint candy.”

“Mentos?”

 _“Me-_ mentos, yeah. Quit laughing, Frase, I can tell when you’re laughing.” Ray couldn’t help grinning too, though, because it was cool the way Fraser’s mind could follow his. Like, sometimes his own brain didn’t go straight from A to B, sometimes it darted sideways instead, but Fraser’s brain worked in zigzags too, and when two people meshed like that, that wasn’t dysfunction, that was _dancing._

“Yeah,” he said, “I made a memento shelf, before I forgot. Hey, did you ever track down those illegal hunters you were after, by the way? You said last week you’d found more bodies. I was gonna ask you about it the other day and forgot.”

“Yes, Diefenbaker tracked down the remains of another grizzly, plus four more Dall sheep with most of the flesh still on the carcasses.”

“Not subsistence hunting, then.”

“No,” Fraser said, “and it’s unlikely the sheep were of sufficient age to have been legal trophies, although establishing that in a court of law might be tricky, especially with the skulls missing.”

“But they’re all supposed to be protected within the national park boundaries, right? Can’t you prove they were from there? Run a DNA test or something?”

“Theoretically, I suppose, or isotope testing at a pinch, but we don’t have the funding for that level of investigation. Not for wildlife.”

“So get the park rangers or whatever to do it.”

“Ah, well, that would be Terry,” Fraser said, “and he’s as overstretched as we are. I’m investigating in my spare time as it is.”

Ray snorted. “Tell me about it. We got a six-week wait on homicide DNA here, and that’s for _Homo sapiens._ But you still got the carcasses, right? So you can measure the body sizes, get the ages from that.”

“Yes. My best bet is probably to extrapolate height and weight from the femur length, and estimate age from that.”

“Use all the measurements you got,” Ray said. “Blind the judge with science.” He closed his eyes, trying to picture the illustrations from _North American Fauna_. “Your sheep, they’re a separate subspecies, right? A northern one? So they’re gonna have stockier bodies, smaller extremities or whatever, to keep that whole surface area to volume thing low? I’m guessing here, Frase, you know this stuff better than me.”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Fraser said wryly.

Ray laughed. “Maybe I got hidden depths.”

“Not so hidden,” Fraser said, making Ray flush. “Hmm, I wonder if Karen’s working late this evening. I could—”

“Karen?” Ray interrupted, leaning forward.

“Oh, one of the Large Mammal curators at the Smithsonian. Merely an acquaintance, I assure you, Ray.”

Ray tipped his chair back again, propping one foot on the windowsill. “It’s okay, Frase, I’m just yanking your chain.”

“Ah. Well, she’s assisted me in the past, so I’m sure she wouldn’t mind obtaining measurements on the museum specimens for comparison purposes, if I can catch her on the phone.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ray said, yawning. “You should go call your scientist lady. You in tomorrow?”

“Hopefully, yes. Same time?”

“Yeah. G’night, Frase.”

“Good night, Ray. Sleep well.”

* * *

“Leafs suck,” Ray informed Fraser, taking a swallow of his beer. “They’re goin’ down. Told you so.”

“Maybe they are, at that,” Fraser said, unperturbed. Ray had been trying to rile him up for a while now, but Fraser never got het up about hockey the way he got het up about weird stuff like otter scat or coniferous needle configuration or, or, or—Ray smirked as he thought of the right word— _curling._

Not that Ray’s own attention was a hundred percent on the game either. He’d set a favorite album going—which was why he’d bought a cordless phone in the first place, obviously, so he could talk and dance at the same time—and he was on his third beer, enough to give him itchy feet. Plus he’d had dinner at the Vecchios to celebrate Maria’s eldest kid’s First Communion, and they’d had a few bottles of the good stuff, so he hadn’t been all that sober to start with. Not so drunk he couldn’t dance, though. Not so drunk he didn’t want company.

The shelf unit rattled as he circled towards it, and he paused long enough to prop his empty bottle on its top shelf and grab the folded sweater instead. The coin-inuksuk gave a threatening wobble but stayed upright.

“Hey, Frase, I ever tell you you left some stuff here?” he asked.

“Yes,” Fraser said. “Once or twice.”

“Oh. I knew that.” Ray poked at the inuksuk with an unsteady finger and then swung away again, tugged onwards by the rhythm. He’d suspected it before, but now, with the sudden clarity that alcohol brought, he was certain that Fraser hadn’t lost any of the things on that shelf. He’d left them behind on purpose, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Trail of Mentos, whatever.

The thought made Ray grin wide. Calling Fraser on it would have been mean, though, so he went back to teasing him about the hockey instead, which was turning into more of a massacre than a match. And Fraser, who could always be counted on to be fair, agreed that, yes, the Leafs did seem to be getting their asses handed to them on a plate, and yes, they probably would lose rather badly. He didn’t sound as if he minded, though. He sounded as if watching the game with Ray was just fine with him, whoever happened to win.

Ray himself was paying less and less attention to the TV, because the furniture was starting to get in his way, and the rug kept trying to trip him up. One edge of it caught him by the foot, and he stumbled so hard he almost fell.

“Ow,” he said, trying to figure out why his head was aching. It was his foot he’d caught, not his head. Wasn’t it?

“Ray?” Fraser’s voice said in his ear. “I think you need to sit down.”

“I’m not tired, I’m, uh, oops. Shit.”

“Ray? Ray? Ray? Sit _down.”_

“Uh…” Ray spotted the couch lurking on the edge of his vision and staggered towards it. It came floating up to meet him, its cushions impossibly soft and inviting. “Okay, I sit. Sat. I sat down.”

“Good. Are you lying on your back? Don’t go to sleep on your back, Ray. You don’t want to aspirate anything if you’re sick later.”

“I…whuh?”

“Turn _over,_ Ray.”

Ray didn’t want to move, but Fraser’s voice had that insistent tone, the one that meant he wouldn’t give in until Ray complied, so Ray blinked and turned onto his side. He felt kind of tired after all, as though if he put his head down he might never get back up. He’d have to lie here forever, watching the TV all sideways and blurry. Sideways TV was making him tired.

He wasn’t going to sleep, though, whatever Fraser said. He felt the way he’d felt that last night on the Franklin trip, when he and Fraser had finally reached what passed for a town up there in the far north and splashed out on a hotel room each, real rooms with solid walls and a solid roof. He’d been bone-weary, tired beyond knowing, but he’d lain awake hour after hour, unable to sleep. Without the howling wind to blot it out, the ticking of the central heating seemed louder than a city street, and his heartbeat hammered in his ears, echoing back from the mattress.

In the end he’d gotten up and knocked on Fraser’s door, and Fraser had scooted over and made room for him, the same way they’d slept huddled up in their tent every night before that. Fraser hadn’t made a big deal of it, hadn’t said a word. Maybe he’d felt kind of lost too. Maybe he hadn’t been able to get warm in the strange, artificial heat of the radiators either. Or maybe he’d understood that Ray, surrounded by all that vast emptiness, just needed to hold on while he could.

“Hey, I…” Ray mumbled, and almost dropped the phone. “Ow. Frase?”

“I’m here. Are you lying on your side now?”

“Yeah. I just…I didn’ say, but I…” The couch cushions pressed reassuringly against Ray’s back, and the sweater under his cheek surrounded him with the scent of warmth and safety, and he closed his eyes for a moment to savor the sensation of not being lost.

“Ray? Ray? Ray? Ray?”

Ray blinked. He had the impression he’d been talking for a while, although he didn’t have a clue what about. Something important, though. Something he had to make Fraser understand.

“It’s just, you gotta hold on,” he mumbled, “’cause stuff gets lost, and…”

“I know. It’s okay. Go to sleep, Ray.”

“I mean it,” Ray said, trying to form the words clearly. “Mean everythin’.” He’d lost track of what “it” was, but he was pretty sure it was important.

“I know you do. Go to sleep now, Ray.”

Ray opened his mouth to reply, but the phone slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. He tried to reach for it, but the world had gone dark and he’d already forgotten what he was reaching for.

* * *

Ray went to work the next day with half his face cross-hatched in a cable-knit pattern. He’d woken up on Fraser’s drool-dampened sweater, with the phone lying dead on the floor beside him, and the mother of all headaches. He vaguely remembered having called Fraser at some point, which would make sense, given that he called him most evenings. Hopefully he’d hung up before he’d said anything too dumb—not that Fraser would admit to it if he had.

Ray poured himself a cup of the Two-Seven’s sludgy coffee and trudged over to the bullpen, where Vecchio was already at their shared desk, deep in paperwork.

“Message for you,” Vecchio said, holding out a slip of paper without looking up. “Come on, Kowalski, find second gear. I need your notes for the Liebermann interview ASAP. Y’know, sometime before we both die of old age.” He glanced up into the silence. “Hey, you okay?”

Ray was frowning at the note, which in Frannie’s flowery handwriting read, “9:03 Ray K – Fraser – sweater – 26th?”

“Fraser called the station?” he asked, scratching at his stubble. “Twenty-sixth what?”

Vecchio shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I didn’t take the call.”

“Hey, she’s _your_ sister! I don’t speak Frannie!”

Vecchio gave one of his exaggerated sighs and beckoned Frannie over from the front desk. Ray waved the note at her.

“The twenty-sixth what?” he demanded.

She and Vecchio exchanged a look that Ray couldn’t decipher.

“It’s _cold_ up there,” she told Ray accusingly, tugging hard at her sleeves in a pantomime of chilliness. _“Very_ cold. Fraser needs his _sweater.”_

Ray blinked. “So? I didn’t take it. He left it here.”

Vecchio snorted and shook his head. “Just call him back, Kowalski. We don’t got time for this.”

Ray did call Fraser back. Later. _Much_ later, once he’d written up the Liebermann notes and slogged through another three witness interviews with Vecchio, followed by an interrogation where the perp took a full four hours to trip herself up on her own lies. Ray wasn’t procrastinating. Definitely not. He just had a _job_ to do.

By evening, though, he’d run out of excuses. He sat at his living room window for a while, alternately staring into the street below and scowling at the phone. Then he picked up the handset and hit redial.

“So, I got your message,” he said, when Fraser answered. “You, uh, need your sweater back?”

“Yes,” Fraser said, in the tone that meant he wasn’t actually lying but it was close enough to make him twitch. “Well, admittedly I do possess several similar items of clothing with equivalent insulatory properties, so that particular one couldn’t be called vital, strictly speaking. But it would be welcome nonetheless. It’s certainly quite cold up here at this time of year.”

“Okaaay,” Ray said, a smile beginning to tug at his lips. “I get that. That’s fair. So do you need me to mail it, or, uh…”

There was a slight pause, and then Fraser cleared his throat.

“Diefenbaker and I were considering joining the Dark Chase sled race, as it happens,” he said. “I’ve been assisting my colleague at the detachment here in training her team for the past few months. She’s planning to participate with her son, but there’d be enough dogs left to make up a second team, if Dief led it.”

“Uh-huh,” Ray said. “Dark Chase. Lemme guess, a chase in the dark?”

“Only partially in the dark. We do still have some daylight here, even at this time of year, plus a fair amount of twilight. This isn’t actually the Arctic, Ray.”

“Never said it was, Fraser.”

There was silence for a moment.

“It’s a two-person race, you see,” Fraser said slowly. “Starting on the twenty-sixth.”

“Right.” Ray was doing the math in his head. He had, what, two weeks’ vacation time left?

“And, well, Dief reminded me how proficient you’d become in a short time on the Franklin trip,” Fraser continued. “So we were wondering whether you might be able to spare enough time to join us. If you had nothing better to do, that is.” There was a canine snorting sound in the background. “Diefenbaker, if you’ve nothing sensible to add, I’d thank you to keep your comments to yourself.”

Ray laughed. “Yeah, tell Dief I miss him too. And the sledding was cool, and you do need your sweater, so…”

“Exactly,” Fraser agreed, sounding relieved. “For the insulation.”

“Right, ’cause insulation’s vital at that latitude. You wouldn’t wanna go around sweaterless.”

“No. Not for very long, certainly.”

“I could come up a couple days early, maybe?” Ray suggested. “Get to know the dogs?”

“That sounds like an excellent idea.”

“The twenty-fourth, then?”

“The twenty-fourth,” Fraser said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “Good. I’ll see you then.”

Ray hung up, grinning. Fraser hadn’t actually said “I’m looking forward to it, Ray,” or “I missed you, Ray,” or “We both know I signed up for this race in a blatant ploy to drag you up here, Ray,” but Ray had gotten good at interpretative hearing by then, and he was pretty sure it was implied.

* * *

When Ray went to fill out his vacation card at the Two-Seven, he found Frannie had already filed the request on his behalf. Vecchio, passing by on his way to the break room, snatched the card off him and tossed it back into the personnel tray.

“Don’t ever mess with my sister,” he said. He seized Ray in a momentary headlock and zigzagged a knuckle across Ray’s scalp before Ray could stop him.

“Hey!” Ray said, pulling free and trying to fix his ruined hair. “Asshole.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re welcome, by the way. Give Fraser my love.”

Ray tried to scowl, but he was smiling too much to hide it. Vecchio headed for the corridor, but at the doorway he paused and looked back.

“Hey, Kowalski?”

“What?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you happen to take a wrong turn while you’re up there—y’know, get lost in the snow and don’t come back—I’ll live.”

Ray opened his mouth for the obligatory smartass retort, but then he shut it again. Despite weeks of phone calls, he still didn’t know exactly what Fraser wanted, but hell, even if Fraser only wanted his sweater and a dogsled buddy with some neat navigational skills, it had to beat hanging around in Chicago. And Ray hoped—a big part of him was pretty damn _sure_ —that Fraser wanted more than that.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

Ray hefted his rucksack of winter clothes onto his shoulder, patted his coat pocket to check his compass was still there, and picked up the padded envelope containing the ratty old sweater and other junk that Fraser had left behind. He’d been clutching it all the way from O’Hare, through two layovers and three flights, like some weird bubble-wrapped comfort blanket. On the first couple of planes, the cabin crew had insisted he put it under the seat in front of him for takeoff, but on this last one there’d only been him, the pilot, and a trio of hunters, and nobody gave a damn what he was carrying.

When he clambered down from the little plane and onto the landing strip, Fraser was waiting for him by the airport building. Ray walked towards him, suddenly stiff and self-conscious. A few feet away he stopped and held out the parcel in his mittened hands.

“I brought your stuff…?” he said, the unspoken question hanging between them in the freezing air.

Fraser took the envelope but let it drop straight to the ground as if he’d barely even noticed it; as if, of all the things he’d left behind in Chicago, there was only one that had ever mattered to him, only one he’d ever cared about.

“Ray,” he said, breaking into a smile wider than the tundra. He wrapped both arms around Ray and hugged him close, as if he’d never let go again. _“Ray.”_


End file.
